Love's Labors Lost: Butts in Seats: New Models?

May 9, 2008

Butts in Seats: New Models?

I came across a great discussion (via Scott's Theatre Tribe ning) about why more people aren't seeing theater. You know what surprised me most? How many "lay people" enjoy theater because it's a community thing, where the communal aspect is where they get the value.

With that in mind, here are some random ideas that popped into my head. Most of them center on package deals for groups, not individuals.

Offer dirt cheap tickets ($5 tops, and that's in expensive places like NYLADCHI) to a dress or technical rehearsal for schools and colleges. Let them see how things work behind the scenes in the Real World (ie, the world outside the classroom).
Turn your show into part of a complete night out by offering coupons and discounts to local restaurants. Better yet, feed people before, during, and/or after the show. Offer your show as a place for caterers to market their businesses. Include free concessions as one kind of entertainment package.
Do the Regal Cinemas Crown Club thing. You know why I usually patronize Regal Cinemas when I see movies with my family? Because I get free stuff based on how much I spend: free soda, free popcorn, even free tickets. I know that printing cards or a lot of paper costs too much, but how about we encourage people to save their tickets to get their free stuff? Say, for every 5 tickets, the 6th one is free. Or bring a ticket stub and a playbill to get a discount on the next show.
Stage public commercials. Make them funny; make them quirky; make them sexy; make them whatever. But do something different. In my town, there's a poetry reading called Word Stage (I know because they kept saying that in the microphone while I was trying to read). A little too preachy for my tastes, but I admire that they're not afraid to go where the people are.
Use business cards. Perhaps if they bring in the card when they get a ticket, they get a discount.
Utilize the captive audience on public transportation.
Get attractive actors on the auction block. Do date auctions for actors. Better yet, do one for famous characters in theater (Win a date with Hamlet/Romeo/Stanley/Cyrano/etc.) Paying money to interact with people in costume isn't just for Trekkies, comic book fans, role-players and otaku. There's nothing like the hint of sex to get people to spend money.
Put a Rocky Horror element in every performance. Genetically speaking, we're less than half a step from going "Oook-oook" and flinging poop. Are there places where the audience may get to make noise or throw things? Let them know. Ask them to bring in props or sell them on site.

My brain is pretty fried now. See what I'm doing when I should be writing?

1 comment:

cgeye3/28/2010 3:42 AM
Denver Center already has a buy several, get one free deal connected with its $10 student rush ticket program -- a program's that's underadvertised, as is.
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Words, Words, Words

. . . a lot of it [fostering rather than smothering students' playwriting] has to do with finding a way to construct a dialogue about ongoing work that empowers the writer. A lot of it has to do with making sure there's a diversity of voices around you. A lot of it has to do with thinking of the writing program as a brain trust for writers, not as some infantilization in which the dramaturg gets the power. And basically trying to find a place where everyone's aesthetic in the room grows larger rather than smaller. There are many ways to do that. It's really not a hard thing to do.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

Here is what seems to me an elementary truth that must precede any other: namely, that the theater, an independent and autonomous art, must, in order to revive or simply to live, realize what differentiates it from text, pure speech, literature, and all other fixed and written means.
--Antonin Artaud, letter, 9/15/1931

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all I need for an act of theatre to be engaged.
--Peter Brook, The Empty Space

My work is characterized by one thing above all --- invention. In theatre we imagine the world, we do not record it, we are not documentary makers. I hold all social realism and journalistic theatre in contempt. It is a sordid habit. And the social realists have the impertinence to pretend they are 'telling the truth…'
--Howard Barker, interview

Women and writers of color are still seen as threats because, in essence, when a woman or writer of color is defining a play world, there's another definition of what our society is, and that's very threatening.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

Through this experience [working on " . . . and last week it was a mountain"] I learned the importance of the life and the dynamics under the words, and began to see the power of working from the silent space within - the emotions, the images, the experience and the feelings - rather than relying on the words.
--Sande Shurin, Transformational Acting: A Step Beyond

How does it happen that . . . the Occidental theater does not see theater under any other aspect than as a theater of dialogue?
--Antonin Artaud, Theater and Its Double

All conventions are imaginable, but they depend on the absence of rigid forms.
--Peter Brook, The Open Door

I never 'say' anything in my work. I invent a world. Let others decide what is being 'said'. Nor do I claim to tell the truth or enlighten people. We are suffocated by writers who want to enlighten us with their truths. For me, the theatre is beautiful because it is a secret, and secrets seduce us, we all want to share secrets. That is also its politics, if it has any politics at all. And modern democracies hate secrets, they want everything transparent. Obviously the critics collaborate in this desire to expose everything to the light of day, they are the police force, after all.
--Howard Barker, interview

I think that form is content . . . I've always been more interested . . . in the formal devices and the structure rather than in the subject matter . . . I really am a follower of Viktor Shklovsky, who said that in some ways the subject matter doesn't even matter. It's whether or not we see the subject matter anew that matters.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

I am well aware that the language of gestures and postures, dance and music, is less capable of analyzing a character, revealing a man's thoughts, or elucidating states of consciousness clearly and precisely, than is verbal language, but who ever said the theater was created to analyze a character, to resolve conflicts of love and duty, to wrestle with all the problems of a typical and psychological nature that monopolize our contemporary stage?
--Antonin Artaud, Theater and Its Double

The mediocre artist prefers not to take risks, which is why he is conventional.
--Peter Brook, The Open Door

"Transcendence became my life theme. I wanted to be lifted beyond everyday circumstances and everyday reality."
--Sande Shurin, Transformational Acting: A Step Beyond

I actually think of writing for the stage as not writing . . . It's about structuring, about gaps between the language that are really filled in by the collaborators and the process. It's all about indirection rather than a direct statement . . . It's like a three-dimensional chess game in a way. If I say this, will the director go in this direction? If I say this, will the actor respond? And one of the delights of the process is actually not having your intention fulfilled, but finding out at times that other people's interpretation or intention is actually more interesting than you originally thought of.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

The person who has an idea of what this language is will be able to understand us. We write only for him. --Antonin Artaud, letter, 9/28/1932